Did Mark Meadows, the former Trump White House chief of staff, commit voter fraud? Did he do anything illegal at all? There’s a lot of hyperventilating on this story, but so far, we need more facts before jumping to conclusions. And the policy conclusions they suggest about ballot integrity are not what progressives or liberals may like.
Here’s the deal: Originally born in a U.S. Army hospital in Verdun, France, Meadows grew up in Florida but moved to North Carolina in 1986. He represented a North Carolina congressional district from 2013 until March 31, 2020, when he left to join the Trump White House. Undoubtedly, as with most members of Congress, he spent more time living in and around D.C. than in the place he actually represented, but nearly everybody in Congress keeps a legal residence back home, votes there, and pays taxes there. Meadows voted in the 2020 election in North Carolina, the same state he had represented in Congress until that spring. In 2021, out of office, he voted in Virginia, and reportedly did not file the paperwork to be taken off the voter rolls in North Carolina. This is a common oversight, which is precisely why states have, and need, the power to purge from their rolls voters who may have moved to another state and registered there — a step that is widely and misleadingly described as “disenfranchising” voters when Republican-run states do it. Virginia is one of 31 states (red and blue alike) that belong to the Electronic Registration Information Center, a nonprofit that helps inform states about voters who have moved; North Carolina is not. Following news reports about Meadows voting in Virginia, North Carolina has now purged Meadows from the rolls. The North Carolina official heading the inquiry defended purging Meadows for having a duplicate registration as “a normal practice.”
Press reports have been loud but vague: “Mark Meadows removed from N.C. voter roll amid fraud investigation,” says Amy Wang of the Washington Post. Meadows, of course, had obvious incentives to stay registered in North Carolina in 2020, when that state was a presidential battleground and holding hotly contested Senate and gubernatorial races, and to reregister in Virginia in 2021, when the state was holding a high-profile race for governor. (Press reports have not indicated when he registered in Virginia.) There is nothing wrong with voting in one state, moving your legal residence to another state, then voting there. There is no fraud, only the risk of fraud, in failing to remove yourself from your old state’s voter rolls. So far as I have seen publicly reported, he did not vote anywhere else in 2020. The only question, but a legitimate one, is whether he was properly classified as a resident in the place where he voted.
Should Meadows have remained eligible to vote in North Carolina in November, 2020? Charles Bethea of the New Yorker notes that Meadows sold his house in Sapphire, North Carolina in March, 2020 and did not buy a new, permanent residence; he instead re-registered in September, 2020, listing his residence as a mobile home in Scaly Mountain, N.C., that he does not own and seems never have lived in, but where his wife and children had stayed on periodic vacations. Scaly Mountain is 26 miles from Sapphire, but both are located in Meadows’s old district, the eleventh, now represented by Madison Cawthorn. North Carolina is now investigating whether this was a legitimate domicile as a matter of North Carolina election law. If it wasn’t, Meadows’s vote should not have counted — even at the cost of “disenfranchising” him entirely. That’s the law, and it applies even to the high and mighty. The same goes for state-law penalties under North Carolina election law.
At the same time, unlike a recent case of two Florida men who voted twice, this is a pretty far cry from what we typically think of as “voter fraud.” Meadows was unquestionably an American citizen eligible to vote. He wasn’t trying to squeeze himself into some totally new jurisdiction; he was a North Carolina homeowner and congressman when the presidential primaries were held. He had lived in the state for 34 years. He appears not to have settled on a new permanent residence anywhere by September — understandably, given that he was waiting on the election results to know whether he was still going to be White House chief of staff. He was, in short, a transient. His case is unlike the widely publicized controversy over New York mayor Eric Adams, who seems to have conducted an elaborate years-long charade in order to remain Brooklyn borough president while not actually living in Brooklyn.
As far as policy questions about voter fraud, if it is concluded that Meadows was ineligible to vote in Scaly Mountain, that underlines the near-impossibility of policing certain kinds of illegal voting. This took over a year to come out, and was only discovered because Meadows is a prominent political figure. There was no way for elections officials to check this sort of thing — they couldn’t challenge Meadows’s eligibility to vote, because he was unquestionably eligible to vote somewhere, and they couldn’t check the rolls in a different place, because (so far as we can tell) he was apparently registered only in one place in 2020. I assume he probably still had an unexpired North Carolina driver’s license. Plus, elections officials would naturally assume that a man who represented North Carolina in Congress until seven months before Election Day was still a resident of North Carolina. The one tool that would prevent real abuses in this area is to allow states to do more of what they do already: Purge the voter rolls of people who have moved away and settled somewhere else.